A Tale of Hell
by TheMaster4444
Summary: Willow did revive Buffy from Hell in Season 6. Now she tells Spike about the horrors she witnessed and committed in the pit. T because I'm paranoid.


A Tale of Hell

Buffy walked out of the Magic Box to be alone. She had felt out of place when she was around her friends. They were all shiny and beaming with joy at how they brought her back. But they didn't know what had happened to her when she was six feet under. They didn't know that they had brought back a monster.

That was why she sought to avoid them in the alley. But even that haunted her as the sun glared from up above her, as if warning her that this was no longer her world. She was a smudge upon the glorious canvas of the world just like the creatures she had fought and then served.

But her solitude did not last. "How are you doing?" called Spike, leaning under an outcropping to shield himself from the blazing rays of light. Feeling that maybe there was someone she could confide in, Buffy walked over to the blond vampire and sat down on a crate next to him. "Say aren't you leaving a sodden hole in the middle of some great group hug?"

"I just wanted some time alone" she informed him.

"Oh" he stammered, unaware that his was probably the only presence that didn't make her want to send herself back to hell. "I'll just leave you too it then." He rose to leave before realizing that he could not leave the shade of the outcropping.

"It's okay" Buffy assured him. "I can be alone with you here."

"Thanks ever so much" he retorted playfully before resuming his seat at my side. "Buff? Slayer?" he tentatively asked, "Are you okay?"

"I'm fine. I'm good" she lied, losing her courage to disclose her true state.

But Spike had always cared, even when he had hated her with everything he had. So he pressed on. "Buffy, if you're in… if you're in any pain, or if you need anything or I can do anything for you"-

"You can't" she cut him off, staring down at her feet in shame.

"Is that so?" he countered, gaining back a bit of his old savvy. "I may not have been to a hell dimension as of late, but I do know a thing or two about torment."

"Not a hell dimension" I corrected him.

Spike tilted his head in confusion. I could tell that I needed to explain everything I had gone through. Everything I had done.

"Glory's portal didn't send me to some knock off fire pit hell dimension" I stated. "I was flung full throttle into the one and only home office. The demons there weren't hybrids like the ones we've fought here. They were spirits of black smoke and endless pain. Pure demons, descended from the devil himself. And they put me up on the rack to burn."

"You said I was dead for one hundred and forty seven days, almost five months. But for me, in the pit, it was fifty years of endless suffering. And believe me when I say that when you're already dead, the torturers don't hold anything back. Every day they tore me open, each time in a different, more excruciatingly painful way."

Spike paused before he interjected. "Buffy, I really can't imagine what it must have been like. I've been torturer and tortured both and what you're saying sounds impossible. It's understandable if you've got some bad post traumatic stress from the whole thing. It would be alright to tell your Scoobies."

The Slayer shook her head. "That's not even close. At the end of each day, after all the horrors that had been dealt to me had been undone and my form healed, then the torturer, a demon named Alastair, would make me an offer. The same offer every time. He would take me off the rack, end my suffering, if I put other souls on and took his place as their tormentor. And every time I said no."

Spike sympathized with her. There wasn't a creature of the night that was alive or undead that hadn't heard of Alastair. He was the thing they feared above almost anything else, the thing that crawled through their nightmares. The fact that Buffy had endured his torture was a testament to her spirit.

"For forty damn years, I said no" Buffy finished. Spike realized the implications of her words. She had been in hell for five decades. She had only said no for four.

"I just couldn't take it anymore" she continued. "I had taken so much crap in life and now death had brought me no peace. I just wanted the pain to stop. So I said yes" she sobbed out, tears running from her eyes in a tidal wave. "Damn me I said yes. And he kept his word. He took me off the rack and handed me the arsenal of hell."

Spike could barely believe what he was hearing. Alastair had broken his slayer. It taken the bastard fifty years and all the tortures of hell but he had done what Spike had dreamed of doing so long ago. He had made the Slayer into what she fought.

"I unleashed torment like nothing I've ever imagined" Buffy went on. "I ripped off people's fingernails, the whole thing not just the tip, and pressed them hard into the exposed flesh. I took their legs and forced them to shove them down their own throats. Hell, I turned their lungs inside out and dragged a burning coal across them, like breathing, but with an inferno instead of air."

"But the worst part was that… I loved it" she finally admitted, her voice hoarse. "Damn me, but I loved every hour, every minute, every second, every moment. I don't know why, but as I tore open those poor souls and laid their intestines out before their eyes, some part of me, some ancient piece of my being reveled in dealing out the pain to those who it could actually harm, instead of just shrugging it off and coming back to tear me apart later."

"Well maybe it was the demon in you" Spike attempted to comfort her, even as she looked at him in horror. "You said yourself; the slayer gains her power from a demon."

Buffy shook her head. "I just don't know. Down there I didn't know who or what I was anymore. Being back here, everything is so much clearer. Including what I've become." She pushed her head between her knees attempting to hide from herself. Spike placed his hand on her shoulder comfortingly, knowing that no words he could speak would help.

"The worst is yet to come" Buffy whispered. "That demon that the gang accidentally made bringing me back, before I killed it, it told me something. 'You have broken the first seal. Lilith sends her thanks."

"What the bloody hell does that mean?" Spike commented, keeping his voice soft despite his language.

"I don't know" Buffy admitted. "But something tells me that it will make Glory look like a kitten. Still the gang can never know what happened in hell."

She rose to leave the vampire, allowing her gaze to wander to the Magic Box door for a mere moment. "They can never know they brought back a monster."

**Might expand on this later but I've too many stories going on right now to do anything more than an oneshot.**

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